I used to watch movies - silent movies - and stock companies and theater whenever I could.
The other day in the garage, I found a book report from the seventh grade that I did about silent movie stars. It's funny to look at now, because it really foretold what my future would be.
You have to go back to the '30s and '40s to see a film that's any good.
I can't stop watching black and white movies. I live in a world of Warner Brothers movies and all of that stuff from an older era, and I love them. I still love them. When I look at them, I sometimes think I was born in the wrong time.
Hollywood must have been terrific once.
You know, sound was still a fairly new thing when I came into movies. And the reason musicals happened is because of sound. They could put music in the picture! That's how it all began.
I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.
I watch an awful lot of old Hollywood movies - I'll devour anything with Bette Davis or Joan Crawford. My absolute favourite is 'Sunset Boulevard' starring Gloria Swanson.
'You Must Remember This', the podcast about 'the secret and or forgotten history of Hollywood's first century', has a thread dedicated to Dead Blondes, which is a clue to where it's coming from.
My favorite traditional Christmas movie that I like to watch is All Quiet on the Western Front. It's just not December without that movie in my house.
That's all gone, now, the old, Hollywood.
Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form.
The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema
I like some of the early silent films because I love to watch how actors had to play then. What would interest me today is to do a silent film.
I'm obsessed with those old romance films. I also would love to venture into the silent film world. I think that's extremely compelling and interesting and really relies on the acting, even more so than when you have an actor speaking.
I love to unwind and watch movies, especially those from the classic black-and-white era.
Kids today don't watch a black and white movie.
I've always been a follower of silent movies. I see film as a visual medium with a musical accompaniment, and dialogue is a raft that goes on with it.
I do think there's not enough film history being taught and appreciated. Maybe it's being taught, but I've heard from professors that young kids don't want to look at black-and-white movies. And that's 85 years of film history, with masterpiece after masterpiece.
I used to watch the 'Jackie Gleason Show' and Phil Silvers, those early TV things. And a lot of them were patterned on the silent comedies of the '20s.
I remember vividly seeing 'Tarzan' and Fred Astaire, the Chaplin films, Fred Astaire musicals, MGM, because of my mother. She was just interested in everything and she took me to opera and ballet, and then ballet got me hooked.
I just walk how I walk. But I am also really inspired by the physical drama in silent films from the beginning of the 20th century - it's ice cold and unreachable, like the stare of a sniper! I guess this look is something new that I brought into the world of fashion: a dark and dramatic, 19th century Russian literature and drama inspired look.
My father comes from a generation of film that actors my age don't even know about, which is really sad.
For film at the beginning of the 20th century, they didn't even know what editing was yet. Actors didn't know how to perform in front of the camera. There wasn't sound.
When movies first came out, maybe they were in black and white and there wasn't any sound and people were saying the theater is still the place to be. But now movies and theater have found their own place in the world. They are each legitimate art forms.
